AI’s biggest boosters promise a near-future where advanced levels of automation do, well, everything. Rockstar cofounder Dan Houser, who helped write Grand Theft Auto V and Red Dead Redemption 2, isn’t convinced. He recently commented that while LLM tech can impress, it’s far from the magic solution many are hyping it up to be.
Houser appeared over the weekend on Sunday Brunch, a British talk show, to talk about his studio and entertainment company Absurd Ventures, and to plug his new novel, A Better Paradise (h/t PCGamesN). Given the novel’s focus on AI characters, and the state of the tech industry and game development, it was only natural for the hosts to ask what Houser thinks of real AI and whether he’s making use of it in his creative works.
“We are dabbling in using AI,” Houser said, “but the truth is a lot of it’s not as useful as some of the companies would have you believe.” Houser pushed back on the rather eccentric promises of tech CEOs, “they will claim it can solve every single problem, and it really can’t yet.”
Houser’s comments follow some recent controversy surrounding AI and video games. Call of Duty recently caught some heat for its rather obnoxious use of fully AI-generated images in-game. Meanwhile, Ubisoft is going all in on AI tools to produce future games, recently showing off what it calls the “first playable generative AI research project.”
But as Houser argues, much of the hype surrounding the tech is “just to sell AI stock,” and all of its promises seem only possible “if we give it all of our money.” He notes that many automated processes are simply a fact of modern computing and are typically best at doing rather boring and mundane tasks. Houser hasn’t ruled out the tech entirely, saying that it will “be interesting to see” how AI grows in its capacity to handle more precious creative tasks, he sounds much more skeptical than some developers who tout AI as the next revolution for gaming.
